Research

Analyst/investor (A/I) days are a relatively new and distinct channel of firm disclosure. We show that firms are more likely to host A/I days when levels of current product market competition are low and threats from potential rivals are high—the pattern that we label “competition timing”. Such timing predicts a higher informativeness of an event, with companies emphasising innovation, forward outlooks, and firm value. It is also associated with stronger market responses, including a more positive tone of speakers, higher short-term abnormal returns, improved stock liquidity, sustained increases in institutional ownership post-event, and a subsequent drop in the pressure from potential competitors entering the same product-market space. Our results establish A/I days as a potential strategic tool for firms’ competitive positioning.

We study how prices incorporate information released during Analyst/Investor Days, multi-hour corporate disclosure events with prepared manager presentations and Q&A session. Aligning sentence-timestamped transcripts with tick-level trades and quotes for 2,490 U.S. events from 2014 to 2025, we show that 80% of the event-window return is impounded before the Q&A begins through both discrete jumps and locally explosive drift bursts. Discrete jumps mostly respond to forward-looking and future-oriented statements, and are more likely after speaker negative-tone minutes and when the CEO is speaking. In contrast, gradual price adjustments (drift bursts) respond to signed order-flow imbalance and are largely unrelated to language. Decomposing order flow imbalance into retail and non-retail, retail imbalance has the strongest impact on stock prices when managers are speaking, while the interaction of non-retail imbalance with presenter characteristics and speech is limited.